{"id":26585,"date":"2019-06-24T06:00:38","date_gmt":"2019-06-24T05:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/a-desk.org\/magazine\/la-saciedad-del-espectaculo\/"},"modified":"2019-08-02T19:29:27","modified_gmt":"2019-08-02T18:29:27","slug":"la-saciedad-del-espectaculo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/a-desk.org\/en\/magazine\/la-saciedad-del-espectaculo\/","title":{"rendered":"The Satiety of Spectacle"},"content":{"rendered":"

A friend of mine is dressed up as a chip asleep on the floor at an art fair, along with fifteen other people, similarly dressed up, lying in a circle and sharing a round blanket shaped like a fried egg. This is the work by the Lolo and Lauti duo (Lautaro Camino and Lorenzo Anzo\u00e1tegui) for the last arteBA fair: the performers are supposed to sleep at the fair, wearing their collective fancy dress of egg and chips, but in order to do so they have to make sure they don’t sleep beforehand: Lolo and Lauti flood them with invitations to parties and discos to guarantee they spend the night awake. The days go by and the reviews pour in: the duo’s social media are crammed with comments, memes and internal jokes. Weeks later, in a group chat, we got together to discuss this and other phenomena. <\/span><\/p>\n

DB \u2013 Tell us how you became an art duo, not only as artists but also as personalities, something closer to the idea of media entities,<\/i>celebrities.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lolo \u2013 Hello all, we’re Lolo and Lauti, performers and video artists. We met at a party and worked together nine years ago, in 2011. We use spectacle a lot as artistic material. There are obviously many signs of this, aren’t there? Of the language of celebrities or the language of the media \u2026 <\/span><\/p>\n

Lauti \u2013 We forged our alliance, Lolo and Lauti, with secret and dramatic ends we shan’t tell you about, but we’ll sum it up for you.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lolo \u2013 We’ll send you an animal power of a quote …<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

(They send me a clip from the film Chicago\u00a0<\/i>(2002), starring Catherine Zeta-Jones and Ren\u00e9e Zellweger, where Velma [Jones’s character] persuades Roxie Hart [Zellweger] to join her to form a duo of convict dancers.)<\/span><\/p>\n

DB \u2013 On the other hand, I was trying to determine your possible local references and was thinking of figures from the sixties, a period in which the idea of the artist as a star was more widespread. I was thinking of Marta Minujin, Dalila Puzzovio, Edgardo Gim\u00e9nez, etc. But you have closer ties with the world of television, or even of the Internet, from Susana and Moria<\/a> to memes.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lolo \u2013 Our favourite artist of the sixties is Nacha Guevara<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lauti \u2013 In other words, our favourite Argentinean artist is of the sixties and is Nacha Guevara.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lolo \u2013 Of course we like Minuj\u00edn, Gim\u00e9nez and all the rest, but the only artist related to performance, the artist who is our reference for performance and for what could be done in the discipline is Nacha. Before performance art was called performance art Nacha was already practicing it.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lauti – Last year we went to see Nacha at the Gran Rivadavia theatre, where she performed the songs she would never sing again, a show about the legendary Di Tella [art centre].<\/span><\/p>\n

Lolo \u2013 We have other more recent national references.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lolo and Lauti \u2013 Susana and Moria, of course!<\/span><\/p>\n

Lauti \u2013 A friend once asked us what we would do if YouTube disappeared, whether we’d be out of work.<\/span><\/p>\n

DB \u2013 I also think that you embody a very Porte\u00f1o identity that at some point was reflected on Argentinean television. I mean reflected as Moria reflected it, for instance.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lolo \u2013 Both of us are very Porte\u00f1o like Lauti, we love these cultural aspects of Porte\u00f1o identity that come and go and remain. I think they’re very useful: Mafalda is an example of something that was all-pervasive in Argentinean culture and we didn’t think anything interesting had been done on the subject. And there are a lot of other things too.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Lolo and Lauti, Mafalda<\/i>. Single-channel video, 3 ‘, 2018<\/span><\/p>\n

DB \u2013 In turn, when I see your videos I think they could well form a part of the compilations of\u00a0the funniest videos on the Internet, etc. Your works often have to do with memes and the way in which images and contents circulate on social media. It’s a bit like what happened with Me huevo loca\u00a0<\/i>(the work they presented at this year’s arteBA). I suppose the idea was that what was supposed to happen actually took place, went viral, that we all shared the photo, the story, that it had a massive impact, etc.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lolo \u2013 We didn’t intend it to go viral, although we find that sort of perception inspiring; sometimes it’s just a coincidence that it should go viral. In a performance called iSexy\u00a0<\/i><\/a>a couple of years ago, for instance, we used virtual reality devices and simulated sex scenes in the middle of the fair. A story about that went viral, appeared in Reddit forums and became a meme, transcending us \u2014 a meme that wasn’t even associated with us. But of course, the objective of an art fair is to create a work that stands out, which means it’s Instagrammable.<\/span><\/p>\n

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